Part I: The Ghost in Public.
Why Do I Hide From the World?

The moment between writing this text and you reading it. This gap, this link between what the mind thinks it does, and what it actually did.

A man writing to himself in a public space, thinking no one reads his words, is exposing himself to the world. The traces of thought are now present for anyone who comes across them. Whether the writer denies it or not.

Since this writing is visible to you and anyone else who might read this, it is not a private affair anymore. Sending out traces of thought in the digital world is deliberate participation, a decision to let one thought be a point in the sky, visible, and potentially receiving the attention of another mind.

What do I see in all this? As I reflect on trying to hide while writing on digital paper planes, flying through the forum area for anyone ready to pick them up. Perhaps the reason I accept this blindness is not wanting to take any form of responsibility or accountability. But now I ask a question I avoided for a very, very long time: Am I responsible for my own actions? Am I accountable for my actions and their effects? So I go about in life, pretending my words and actions have no effect on the world at all. So I ask myself whether I should trust my interpretations and justifications, or simply see what I’m doing. To see what I’m doing without an after-story, justification or explanation of why. It’s a question which I’m asking of myself right now. Do I really want to pretend accountability doesn’t apply to me? Do I really want to believe that I’m some sort of a ghost? Meeting people and then disappearing out of nowhere, for any reason at all, because I have built walls around myself, not allowing myself to see through my own biases and justifications.

Part II: The Sky Behind Thought. Can I Perceive Before I Interpret?

So where is the root of this illusion, of pretending and believing I’m invisible, hidden and unseen, especially when I’m clearly physically present, seeing others, being seen, or leaving traces online here in front of you?

Where is the root of all these stories, words, and interpretations? Is it that when thinking happens, I am seeing the world through what memory has accumulated? Having accumulated a lot of experience and knowledge, I seem to have categorized absolutely everything in life. And any new person or place I see, I see only the category I have assigned to each of them, “I know him”, “I don’t know her”, “this place is cool”, “this place is boring”. I barely spend any time looking at someone or at something, before I’m immediately focused on what all this is, and how to respond to them or immediately label them: ‘a stranger’, ‘a lovely person’, etc. I think rather than perceive, and therefore live in imagination, seeing the world through a distorted lens. I don’t actually look, I only scan and label. That lens is like a thousand echoes of the source sound. The source sound is already gone, yet it remains registered in the brain. That registration repeats the same sound. In my life, that record of the old sound now plays louder than the new sound: what is actually going on now. And this is what is going on: things happen around me. People look at me or talk to me, and I don’t see them doing it. I only see my mind’s interpretation of what is happening. But when I look at the interpretation for what it is… …. …. …. .

This delusion of being separate. Of not being present in the room, but living hidden within the depths of my own mind. Thinking is active while things happening in real time go unnoticed. Focused on what the mind thinks, not what is happening in front of me. And within that thinking, various actions and decisions arise: Hiding behind a persona, hiding behind what I think I am. Thinking about what I should be, or should do, or should say, rather than just seeing the truth in front of me. The truth of what I am, what I’m doing. And truth lives before any description has been given to it. Description is= interpretation of fact. The more the believed interpretation differs from the fact, the greater the denial, and a wall of thought separates me from another human. When that happens, I am not there with those real human beings in my vicinity. What meets them is not me, but my accumulated knowledge. It is my accumulated knowledge that interprets, identifies, and tags what I see, what I hear and what I feel. This is the real gap: the distance between what my senses perceive and what I see through analysis, rather than perceiving it directly. Once I heard that thinking is living. I don’t need to think to see an animal in front of me in the woods. I just see it. Isn’t that enough to be considered alive? Do I really need the thoughts appearing and commenting on the animal, or whatever it is that I see? I spend my life living inside my own simulation of the world. Of what is acceptable, what is to be avoided. Like a train, going always in the same direction.

So I see that if I write anything publicly I expose myself to being seen, not hidden as I thought I was. Posting words online and wanting to hide is a difficult combination indeed. “We’ve been observing from the inside for too long”. It is time for me not to hide behind any interpretation? Perhaps yes. But not by decision, but with caution.

Every time I wrote before, I thought I was hiding behind some shield of anonymity. Denying the truth of what I was doing, which is publicly posting those words. But this time it’s different. My accumulated knowledge and experience and wisdom, is registered bits of information. And I never actually tried to drop it. Drop all associations, memories, plans, all those interpretations of what this world is, my role in it, what I should or should not do, and just for the current moment, to listen to those birds outside the window. Not because I wanted to listen to something, but just because my ears hear them, without any choice from me. So I listened to the birds.

Thoughts like trees, covering the sky. The sky is the fact. Branches of memory, created through thinking and memorizing, keep expanding, however, and without realizing it, I began to see nothing but branches. But now that I realize that what I know has become a distortion, I begin to question this state of awareness.